What About the Girls?

In the new film “Girlhood,” the French director Céline Sciamma’s third feature film, which comes out today in limited release, I can count on one hand the number of scenes with men. There are a few with the menacing older brother of the main character, a sixteen-year-old French girl named Marieme, and a couple with the neighborhood boys, one of whom is the object of Marieme’s affection. Otherwise, the movie revels in its girls—their thoughts, their experiences. Set in the working-class public-housing projects outside of Paris, the movie’s opening scene lets us know that our expectations of its title will be both fulfilled and subverted: a pack of serious, well-padded football players rushes onto a field and begins aggressively playing; it’s not for a few moments until you see their braids, ponytails, and faces—these are girls in the game. Afterward, the group of giggling black and brown teen-agers (the film’s French title is “Bande de Filles”) walks home, gossiping and rebuffing catcallers. We follow Marieme into her house and watch her feed and put her younger sisters to bed, almost waiting for the major male characters to appear. They don’t, an absence that reflects the teen-age-girl experience: men are auxiliary, and women are the ones who build you up and break you down.

The plot revolves around Marieme, a shy, luminous girl with dark, smooth skin, long cornrows, and high cheekbones who is more of a nurturing caretaker to her sisters than her overworked single mother is, but who, as a result, is failing out of school. When Marieme is told that she does not have the grades to attend high school and will have to enroll in vocational training—something she does not want to do—she is briefly adrift. A gang of girls—cool, alluring, and slightly dangerous—entices her into their fold soon after, though, and Marieme’s odyssey into womanhood begins. Her initiation into the group is endearing and thrilling. (A scene involving the girls confronting a white shopgirl following Marieme around the store is especially funny.) She trades her braids for sultry hair extensions and a leather jacket, and tries bullying and fighting (her new friends encourage her to be confident and take what she wants); one gives her a necklace inscribed with the word “Vic” (short for “Victoire”) and we can see Marieme open, and begin to decide who she wants to be.

“Girlhood” is electric as it trails the girls blasting music and dancing on the subway, getting into fights, singing to Rihanna while wearing shoplifted dresses in a rented hotel room—a place where the girls can be unfiltered and free—and doing the other things that girls do when they’re testing themselves and each other. The energy and beauty of the film comes from these moments and from its camera’s contentedness with languidly resting on the simultaneously innocent and wizened faces and bodies of these not-yet women. The dynamics of Marieme’s group—the shifting alliances but enduring loyalty, the competitiveness, and the fierce love and protectiveness—are specific to these teen-agers from the banlieue but are also hallmarks of any girlhood. Which girl hasn’t been seduced and intoxicated by her own dream girls, and also disturbed and betrayed by them?

In addition to the near void of male characters, there are few white ones either. The inhabitants of Marieme’s world are girls we don’t see often onscreen but who talk and behave like the ones we know in real life. It is rare to see women of color of such complexity and depth, but only because filmmakers have treated their stories as rarefied or ghettoized narratives, and not as part of the everyday experience. “Girlhood” shows that the opposite is true. “I was struck by the fact that were very few black characters in French cinema, in European cinema, and even in world cinema,” Sciamma told me. “I didn’t want to do a movie about black people; I thought why not give a new face to an emblematic story of the French youth today?” And while stories of young men coming of age together, and all the bonding and hazing that comes with it, seem to be everywhere in film, depictions of the friendships among their female counterparts are harder to find. Watching the girls relating to each other, not about men and absent of men, still feels revolutionary.

There are some films that have done female friendship well. The inanity of the rituals of teen-age girls—the semi-rigid hierarchies, mandatory conformity, mob mentality, and rules of inclusion and exclusion—are mocked endlessly in 2004’s “Mean Girls,” a cult classic. We laugh at the warring cliques, because, for the older of us, the tears have long dried. Lindsay Lohan’s protagonist is endearing because she’s new to the world of adolescent girls, and amazed to see the torture they put themselves through, a moment that all women can remember nostalgically while yearning for our more innocent selves. We soon learned how to survive, though, and the way you did set the path for how you would relate to those girls as an adult: a woman who seeks support in other women, or one who “just doesn’t get along” with them. In 1996’s “The Craft,” another beloved film, the smart outcast girls, tired of being bullied outsiders, turn to witchcraft to exact revenge on their popular tormentors, and to, of course, become popular themselves, with mixed results. “Girlhood” has the rebellious spirit of both of these films as well as a thoughtful introspectiveness of its own.

“What is original and singular about friendship among women is they have to be creative; they have to invent their own space because public spaces are not for them,” Sciamma said. “The heart of the movie is about friendship, and wanting to make a portrait of a group and let unfold what a friendship is. And I think that’s what makes the movie one of a kind, that the characters don’t have one identity, one energy, one language, or one way to relate to each other, that they can be empowered and strong, but they also can be melancholic and lonely. They can be kids together, and they can be women.”

Marieme, who is remarkably played by Karidja Touré, is looking for a place to call her own. She relishes her newfound authority, her ability to win street fights and go after the boy she desires, but she’s also conflicted by the sides of her new self that aren’t aligned with the values of the person she used to be. When she sees her younger sister follow in her footsteps and shake down another girl for money, she intervenes and drags her sister home, holding her and pleading with her to not lose herself with her friends. The agonizing balancing act of teen-age girls, between keeping the best parts of you intact and fitting in with the most important family you have outside of your real one, is one that Marieme never conquers. She has other problems, too. She’s forced to leave home so that she can escape an abusive brother, a bleak future of belonging to a boy to whom she has lost her virginity, and an inherited life of grinding menial work. Her group of friends ultimately feels too limiting. She wants to learn how to live for herself.

Marieme’s circumstances are extreme, but she is no less ordinary than the average girl, and no less a dreamer. The sum of any life boils down to the choices a person makes, and one of the strengths of “Girlhood” lies in how it lets Marieme make good and bad decisions with honesty and without judgment. When, in the end, she is left with the aftermath of an ill-advised foray into crime, we can believe that those choices were useful to her growing up, even if they were sometimes unnecessarily difficult. Sciamma said that for the girls in her movie, it’s about “what you say no to, not what you embrace,” and defining yourself through what you won’t do. Marieme comes out scathed but walking, and still fighting for the women in her life. Her girlhood is nearing its end.